Placing and Combining Access Points on the Map

Placing surveyed access points on the map

Ekahau Site Survey is able to place access points on the map automatically after the survey. You can disable the feature by unchecking the "Auto-Place APs" checkbox in the Preferences. If you have disabled the Automatic Placement, you can manually force the automatic on-demand placement of access points from Project > Locate Surveyed Access Points.

Ekahau Site Survey places APs in the location where the AP's signal was detected the strongest on the surveyed path.

The access points locations estimated by ESS may not be exact. You can move the AP to its exact location by simply dragging the AP to the desired location when using the Edit tool. After an AP has been manually moved, the Auto-Locate features will not try to locate the AP any more. Also, if you exit the program or re-open the project, the current AP locations will be fixed, and the Auto-Locate features will not try to locate those APs any more. However, all the newly discovered APs will still be automatically located.

The Automatic Placement will only try to locate the access points that are well audible (surveyed signal strength has exceeded -50dBm in one or more locations). This is to avoid locating the access points inaccurately and clutter on the map by placing all the weak access points from different floor or buildings.

To place an AP that has not been automatically placed, just drag and drop the AP from the AP list to the map.

To find the position of a single AP, click on the "Drag on the map to place" text in the AP list and select Automatically Place Access Point.

Tip: As of ESS 9.1.4, you can move surveyed APs to their right locations without visualization refresh pauses if you have turned visualization prediction OFF from visualization options. All this while the survey results are still being shown!

Combining measured radios and BSSIDs

Ekahau Site Survey tries to automatically combine all the surveyed SSIDs and radios into logical access points. This combination is method is based on the MAC addresses of the said radios and SSIDs. Different vendors can use different logic to combine determine what SSIDs and radios belong to one access, so therefore ESS also uses different logics to combine them automatically.

However, these combination logics and vendor MAC-addresses are constantly updating, so sometimes ESS doesn't know how to combine certain BSSIDs or radios correctly. Some newer vendors might be still missing from ESS. Some vendors don't even have specific mechanic to combine their radios/BSSIDs.

If you run into problems with the AP combination, check Project --> Multi-Radio and Multi-Mac Detection in top row menu. This window lists all the AP vendors whom we try to combine. ESS tries to combine BSSIDs of these vendors into a single. However, note that some of the vendor don't have additional text (Combines radios) on them, which means that we are not actively combining the RADIOS for these vendors, even though we are combining their BSSIDs.

All the bigger vendors and many smaller ones are covered by ESS combination logics!

If you're working on an older project where all APs don't look right, it could be worth an effort to rerun the combination logic for the project, since we are actively tweaking and updating our combination logics. Here's a quick instructions how to run the combination logic again for a project:

Go to Multi-Radio and Multi-Mac Detection window

Toggle OFF "Auto-detect Multi-Mac Access Points"

Press OK

Go back to Multi-Radio and Multi-Mac Detection window

Toggle ON "Auto-detect Multi-Mac Access Points"

Press OK

ESS will run the combination algorithms for all the BSSIDs and radios again and tries combine them in the most logical way based on the updated logic.

In ESS 9.1.3 we also added "Generic grouping" toggle in Multi-Mac options, which tries to combine any BSSIDs and radios that haven't yet been combined on the project or vendors whose APs aren't yet covered by our combination algorithms. This is merely a fallback mechanism and shouldn't pose any harm to the AP combination, but you can toggle it OFF if you think it might combine the APs incorrectly.

Comments

The auto AP placement is a nice feature but I'm wondering how can I see only my signal coverage from my survey's without AP's effecting the coverage?

On AirMagnet you can do the survey and pretty much see a good chunk of the floormap with signal coverage but I noticed for Ekahau unless you place the nearby AP on the map you can't really see the signal coverage for that area. Also by placing the AP on the floormap I would assume that would affect the actual signal coverage.